This disclosure relates to input methods.
Languages that use a logographic script in which one or two characters correspond roughly to one word or meaning have more characters than keys on a standard input device, such as a computer keyboard or a mobile device keypad. For example, the Chinese language contains tens of thousands of characters having pronunciations defined by base Pinyin elements and five tones. The mapping of these potentially many-to-one associations can be implemented by input methods that facilitate entry of characters and symbols not found on input devices. Accordingly, a Roman character style keyboard can be used to input Chinese characters. Likewise, input methods can be used for using a Roman character style keyboard or some other input device to input many other languages that include ideograms, such as the Japanese language, the Korean language, and other languages.
Despite the availability of input method editors, addresses of Internet sites, e.g., uniform resource locators (“URLs”) are often in the form of ASCII characters. Thus, users whose native language is based on a logographic script, e.g., users that primarily speak a Chinese dialect, have difficulty remembering the URLs of web sites, even though they know the literal names of the websites in their languages. Accordingly, these users must take several separate steps to input the URLs of web sites they desire to view. The literal names associated with the URLs can be spelled in the users' languages using the ideographic characters of their languages. As ideographic characters are not directly input by use of Western-style keyboards, input method editors are used to accomplish the conversion from Roman character phonetic inputs (e.g., Pinyin) to candidate ideograph characters (e.g., Hanzi). Thereafter, the ideographic characters are used by a search engine to find potential web site desired by the users, and the users select the web sites if the web sites appear in the resultant search results.